The collected works of SAQ - Page 18

Wound up going with the Hakko 888. Not too big, fast warm-up, enough power to do most anything (60-some watts), ESD safe.

It doesn't do BGAs very well.

Moving back...

If you're starting your journey into alternative computing ("alternative" by modern standards), I'd give you a few pointers:

(1) Buy complete machines of the spec that you want. You can boost memory, HDD and the like easily, but some other parts have "gotchas" on them. It can also be more expensive to buy the parts than the whole machine. Sometimes there are also tricks to putting stuff in them without breaking things that you need to be aware of. Keep the projects for when you know more about what you're doing. Trust me, it's very frustrating to get a machine that you want to explore and find that it requires a hard-to-find bit that's very expensive.

(2) Stick with the original OSes. Yeah, it's a bit more work, but in most of these cases the OS was designed with the hardware, so it will help you to get a feel for what the original designers thought was important. While some are older than the models you list, HP-VUE, OpenLook/OpenWindows, SGI Indigo Magic, and Mac were all different takes on what a UI should be back when companies were still figuring that out.

Try stripping it to one quad of memory and seeing if the problem disappears. If it's still around then try a different single quad.

The error does specify cache ECC error, so it's likely a processor module (PM) fault. You can try touching up the solder connections if you're good.

Not sure specifically about AIX, but in general older UNIXes either had FAT filesystem access (mtools is an option in many cases if not), or used tar/cpio direct to the device. Yeah, you could potentially put a UNIX filesystem on the floppy, but few people actually did that.

That's the self-immolation jumper.

Chances are it's swap and is where your miniroot goes. dksxdys0 is usually root and dksxdys1 is usually swap. Should be in the fx manpage.

During use IRIX usually mounts a swap file on the main filesystem for swap (similar to what Windows does). You can enlarge the swap partition in fx if you know you'll be using swap often and save some time (since it doesn't have to go through the filesystem), but most people have enough RAM to not need to bother.

Diskless or remote install? If diskless, I note that IP27 is conspicuously absent from the supported list per SGI:
http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... ml#id26076

You might want to check that with the MaXX guy - at first there were specific limitations on what systems SGI allowed him to port to.

Per LC (Library of Congress) librarians, punched Mylar tape is still the best choice for long-term archiving of information. It does not rely on proprietary or difficult-to-build reader mechanisms and does not degrade when stored properly.

Surely you've heard the one about what a car would look like if it were designed by UNIX guys? All instrumentation replaced by a single "?" light. Once you see that light come on you can figure out what the problem is with basic test equipment while driving down the highway.

Then again cars do that now (somewhat), don't they. A "Service Required"/"Check engine" light when they could just as easily have a soothing voice come on and say "I've just picked up a fault in the number one spark plug, Dave."

Stripping and junking or stripping and keeping parts?

It looks like you have the "third card cage" VME option (first and second card cages are front/back on the top, third is on the bottom). Onyx/CHALLENGE machines with a third card cage are 3-phase powered. I've never fought with one, but seem to recall that there's a way to convert it to single-phase 240V without much trouble (whereas the big VAXes have 3-phase blowers to contend with).

The definitive answer on the phaseology is to count the OLS modules. Open up the front door and look at the lowest devices on the rack. If you see two next to each other than it's single-phase. If you see 3 it's three phase (but can be converted to single-phase)

Didn't realize the Encore was a NS32032 machine -neat.

Trying to swap in the pages covering IRIX install... has your machine already built the kernel when you select restart? If it hasn't then that can take a while.

You can see what is on the disk with the following: Stop for maintenance, select 5 (command monitor), and then try typing "boot" (ONCE). That will load SASH from the default location, if it errors out then you either have a SAU problem or a variable problem. From sash you can ls dksc(0,1,0) to see if you can find unix or not.

Have you tried reseating the MSC? I don't have Origin diagrams showing how the MSC communicates with the nodeboards, but it could be an error there.

N2 and N4 share XBOW but not router, so the router board doesn't stand out.

White/silver = 128MB/stick
Green (light? haven't seen the other type so I think it might be light) = 32MB/stick
Yellow=16MB/stick

You might want to just pull the DIFF cable off. Unless you have a converter it's unlikely that you'll have much in the way of reasonably-sized HVD disks that aren't on their last legs, and having that channel disconnected is the safe way to go. Sure, you can't stripe across two 20MB/sec channels that way, but do you really want/need to? That way the system either works (proper channel) or doesn't work (wrong channel), you loose the exciting element of "will this smoke my IO4?", but it's probably worth it.

I had mine disconnected (Shel gave me that trick) for many years until I put in the second SE card.

Yep, older ones but still good. Rosegarden started on IRIX.

You can't. It sounds like your Origin is a first-gen model, probably originally 180MHz. The first generation of SPIDER chips on the routers was different from the ones that were qualified/shipped with the later IP31 machines. I'm not sure if that's a "won't work" (V12 on XBOW 1.3) or a "not guaranteed to work" (big SIMMS in early IP20s) issue, but that's what it's referring to.

Well, you know, they finally got some developers who really knew what they were doing and noticed all this bizarro big-endian gunk and a whole bunch of includes that weren't present on their Linux boxes, obviously put there by someone who was blotto and completely unfamiliar with how computers are set up. That kind of useless cruft is just asking for trouble, so you strip it out. Then you add in the latest and greatest MS or Apple-look UI library to show you're up-to-date and things are great, right?

That said, my only big problem with Rosegarden (or many other Linux sound apps) is that they like to use these audio "management" layers that are about as durable as a balsawood house in Florida. IRIX DM may be proprietary, but it seems to work pretty reliably.

OS/2 has had optional networking support in the EE/Connect editions for a long time, since well before I saw it (1.2 or so). IBM even put in TCP/IP support eventually (2.0EE?) for those who couldn't or wouldn't see the light and use SNA.

Does Serenity have the whole codebase to update, or are they still just doing driver and some userspace hacking a la BeOS MAX?

The scary thing is that in the dusty stacks of at least one university library there is a paper on the sociocultrual meanings and implications of the "Major Tom" character. No, I didn't put it there, but someone else did. Can't recall if it was master's or doctorate.

Back when I first heard about OS/2 Harvard Graphics was the app that everyone seemed to be oohing and aahing over.

In the early days it was that OS/2 provided a real protected protected mode graphical operating system. MS didn't go there until NT, and OS/2 was cheaper than a full UNIX with X11 (and, originally, would run on an AT).

OS/2 2.0 provided full 32-bit environment.

Never seen Indigo feet before - were they some sort of marketing thing, or did they serve a purpose (increased stability?)

Well, you could port the EFS filesystem and SGI disklabel support over from Linux to OS X, or you could boot up Knoppix or other Linux in a VM and get at it that way. I'm lazy - I know what I'd do.

note - not positive that Knoppix still has EFS included. Debian does.

Of what? OS/2? See Toastytech: http://toastytech.com/guis/indexos2.html

I suspect his problem is not so much stamina as storage space.

This seems to have been HP's standard acquisitions policy for a while now (at least since Apollo). Spend a lot of money buying a company, discontinue their products at the earliest possible time, then expect the customers to move to HP's stuff. You'd think by now they'd figure out that it doesn't work that way.

Guess this means they'll never patch the y31086 problem

The NeXT Cube had the DSP, the SGIs and Crays had (in their heyday) unique graphics and computational features under the skins.

The New Mac Pro has a fancy case.

that and the fact that it's the first "pro" level computer since what? The DECstation 5000 to likely not offer sufficient internal storage capability?

Even the fans they crow about are pretty thoroughly described in a 40-year old book on boilers that I have.

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They're cheap.

Interesting juxtaposition: the buzz in the '80s was that we needed to have the UNIX derivatives more indistinguishable. The computer companies can't win, can they (not that they even tried, really - the "standardization" was mostly window-dressing, and the eventual move to Linux was because it was cheap).

Ah, Mensys. The company that picked up PDP-11 stuff ages ago.

Perhaps they'll get OVMS now as well?

Too dynamic. Stationary boilers.

VMS source has always been available for a price under the right agreement (for a while it was distributed on microfiche). The "silent Open" was added when they made changes to give POSIX compliance, and refers to open systems, not open source.

It's very solid, quite secure, and still is about the best clustering OS out there.

Open vs proprietary software: In the cathedral the bishop tells you what to do, and as long as the bishop knows what he's doing you'll have plenty of people keeping the foundations strong and cleaning out the sumps. In the bazaar it seems most of the people want to work on the glitzy fancy stuff, so you get 15 different UI toolkits that all somehow look very similar and yet the scheduler keeps a bug that can impact performance severely for a few years. Yes, FOSS stuff is amazing, but you'll note the best projects have a strong "bishop" (or would that be an elder?)

HP didn't help (and, indeed, this seems to be very common with their acquisitions - buy the company, keep their products on life support as long as you have to, then cancel them and wonder why the customers evaluate other options), but the VMS issues started with DEC back when they had all the OS confusion (VMS, OSF/1-DUNIX-Tru64, NT,Linux) and were (a) not seen as pushing UNIX or VMS (because they were pushing Alpha NT so much more) and (b) created the two lines of equipment that were essentially the same except for some being locked to Linux/NT only. Compaq/HP "kicked the neglect up a notch" but didn't start it. VMS has also been generally a more expensive option, with no cohesive "this is why you should consider VMS" strategy (the last attempt, the "exploding servers" publicity bit, didn't really build on VMS' strengths any more than Windows or Linux).

I just realized that this is another milestone - the last bit of DEC to be buried. Compaq killed off VAX, HP killed off Tru64 shortly after buying it and Alpha somewhat later (those pesky customers - they kept buying it instead of quietly going to Integrity). StorageWorks was dropped, now OVMS.